Archive for the ‘Career’ Category

Now that finals are over and many Cogswell students have had to deliver numerous presentations, we thought it might be a good time to offer tips on non-verbal communication. While what you say plays vital role in delivering your presentation, the non-verbal cues you convey can drastically change the message your audience receives.

Some of the non-verbal signals covered in PR Daily that impacts how your audience perceives what you are saying include:

Eye contact

Voice fluctuation

Position in the room

Facial expressions

Hand gestures

Which of these areas do you need to work on to improve your next presentation?

Interested in getting into the Game Audio field? This video in GameSause from the Casual Connect Conference offers an in-depth look at the business by four industry panelists and moderator, Aaron Walz.

Aaron Walz owns Walz Music & Sound. He recently scored the top-ranking Facebook adventure, Ravenwood Fair and has received several awards for his audio work including “Best Game” at the Independent Game Festival and Game Tunnel’s “Best Sound” as well as being nominated for “Best Game Audio” by GDC Online.

Panelists include:

Rich Vreeland (also known as Disasterpeace), an award-winning freelance composer and sound designer based in Berkeley, CA, with a focus in producing and directing dynamic sound treatments for games.

Barry Dowsett who created original audio content for an array of cool projects for developers and publishers such as Activision, Popcap, Electronic Arts, THQ/Dreamworks, F9, Eidos, Gree, Playdom, Griptonite, Microsoft Game Studios, iWin, Disney Interactive, Google and many more.

Dren McDonald is an experienced game audio composer, sound designer and audio director with over 30 shipped titles.

Nick Thomas began his career as lead Engineer/Mixer for Sony Music artists, including Destiny’s Child, Celine Dion, Carlos Santana, Jessica Simpson, Michael Jackson and Ricky Martin. In 2003, Nick joined with Kane Minkus to open SomaTone Interactive and has spent the last 10 years producing the highest quality audio and art content for Gaming.

During the video these five share their experiences working on game audio, the challenges they’ve faced and tips for advancing in the industry.

If you’ve ever designed something for someone else, lots of these statements in BuzzFeed will sound familiar. This humorous collection of cards was conceptualized and spearheaded by Mark Shanley and Paddy Treacy, an advertising creative team in Ireland.

The posters were created by several Irish design professionals, including graphic designers, other ad creatives, illustrators, animators, and directors, to name a few.

It’s only snow, right? How hard can it be to make snow look real? Well several Cogswell alumni who worked on the film could probably tell you stories of long hours in front of their computers striving for the perfection that is a Disney hallmark.

This article and short video in Mashable, talks about the new technology called, ‘material point method,’ that Disney animators created to bring the desired realism to the scenes in the film. The accompanying video was first shared at this summer’s SIGGRAPH when the animators explained the algorthms behind the complex particle response and showed some nifty and very realistic demonstrations of their “snow” in action.

Congratulations to Cogswell alumni Christopher Evart and Andrew Jennings who each received credit on the film as a Character Technical Director and Chad Stubblefield who is credited as Modeling Supervisor!

We often hear about the great job prospects for software engineering grads but according to this article in Dark Reading by Gunter Ollmann, many new grads are finding the scope of those jobs limited by their lack of real-world experience. Mr. Ollmann says that the crux of the problem boils down to colleges missing two critical educational opportunities:

In most colleges students predominantly work on individual assignments rather than collaborative projects.

The vast majority of assignments require students to create code from scratch instead of working on code written by someone else.

Project-based learning is a hallmark of a Cogswell College education. Students have numerous opportunities to work in teams of artists, animators, audio specialists and software engineers and gain the experience they need to become a valuable asset to future employers.

With all of the social media options available and connectedness of today’s consumer, storytelling to relate the sales message has come into new vogue. This technique makes each message personal as the intended audience uses its imagination to fill in the detail.

The Adweek article states, “There is little hesitation in knowing we operate in a cultural and technological world where consumers know everything about a brand, from who owns it to where and how products are manufactured and sold. As a result of this, companies are now evaluated by much more than their products. We are in a world where a brand’s values and the emotions they evoke are narrative material.”

On Wednesday, October 3, Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California is hosting its 5th Annual Disney Animation Inspire Day and five talented Cogswell College students will be among the select few invited to participate. The students taking part in the day-long event are: Steven Chitwood, Colton Fetters, Robert Mariazeta, Michael Sardi and Alondra Paco. The group includes two technical artists and three animators.

For the first time Inspire Day attendees were chosen through an online application process that required them to submit an application, resume, demo reel and letter of recommendation from their faculty. If they had a website, the application asked for links to that as well. Since the application period fell during Cogswell’s break between the summer and fall terms, students who applied had to scramble to get everything in on time.

“For me it was pretty last minute,” said Michael Sardi, “but I had some good 3D work from the Animation in Game class and the Intro to Animation class, some clay models from Sculpture class and some 2D work from an animation project that Robert and I are working on so was able to put my reel together.”

Alondra Paco and Robert Mariazeta faced the same issue. Alondra had a rough reel ready but had to come into campus during the break so she could access Premier Pro in our computer labs.

Steven Chitwood and Colton Fetters had both worked on the most recent film from Cogswell’s Project X animation studio class so were able to populate their demo reels half with material from the film and half with projects they had worked on in various classes. As the two technical artists, Colton focused on compositing and lighting skills while Steven focused on visual effects work.

The group is taking an early morning flight to Burbank tomorrow morning so they will be at Disney by 9:00AM. During the day students will get a behind-the-scenes look at how Disney films are made, have their demo reel critiqued by industry professionals and a lucky few may be invited to apply for either an internship or job.

They fly back home later that evening and though we know they will be tired – we’re sure that the Disney experience will inspire them! Good luck and we can’t wait to hear how your day went.

It may have seemed like a great idea at the time – like the Marriott Hotel marketing campaign on 9/11 anniversary where they offered complimentary coffee and muffins to guests from 8:45 to 9:15AM “in remembrance of those we lost” but in retrospect, we’re sure they wished they’d passed that one up. The public reaction was not pretty.

Adweek reported on a panel discussion hosted by JTW of elite advertising executives who talked about some of the mistakes they made over the years and what they, as creatives, learned from them. Some felt their flops were great lessons in humility, putting things in perspective and making sure the ad resonates with the target market. There are some entertaining video clips included in the article.

Now that you have your business off the ground – it’s time to find the thought leaders and experts in your field and start building a relationship with as many of them as you can. But where do you begin looking and once you find them how do you get them to notice you?

A few suggestions for finding them include: Industry awards and events, Twitter lists and podcasts and forums. Ideas for building relationships include follow and comment through social media, share original content and ask for their opinions or be helpful with any introductions you can make.

Check out this helpful article for more ideas. What have you done to find influencers?

Here’s a little Friday inspiration and give you something to contemplate over the weekend. In this Huffington Post article, Mountain View-based Polyvore’s CEO, Jess Lee, talks about a unique program she implemented called, ‘simplification month.’ Lee is a firm believer in the importance of creating a work environment that makes sure employees are happy and doing work they love.

One of the ways to achieve that goal is to make everyone’s work life simpler by reducing the number of tasks that are not productive. It took a corporate mind-shift but the plan seems to be working.

To reinforce her basic philosophy, Lee says that if she were 100 years old and looking back on her life one of the measures of success would be how many people she has worked with would ever want to work with her again if she started a new company.

At age 100, if you look back at your life, what would you consider to be the measure of your success?